Wilderness And Rescue Medicine

A Guide to Practicing Medicine in Challenging Environments Wilderness and Rescue Medicine: A Practical Guide for the Basic and Advanced Practitioner provides the critical insight and tools required to practice medicine in remote or challenging environments. There is no place in field medicine for unreasonable restrictions on the practical application of medical judgment—that is the guiding philosophy of this user-friendly guide. Wilderness and Rescue Medicine: A Practical Guide for the Basic and Advanced Practitioner teaches readers how to improvise, adapt and exercise reasonable judgment at any level of medical training and in any difficult environment, from the desert to the oceans, from the backwoods to cities stricken by disaster. Grounded in the collective wisdom of hundreds of instructors, rescue personnel and medical practitioners, this text explores medical problems in a broad wilderness context—including cold injuries, altitude illness, diving and lightening injuries and toxins, among others—and pairs that exploration with the realities of solving such problems in the field, well outside the confines and comforts of mainstream medicine. Wilderness and Rescue Medicine: A Practical Guide for the Basic and Advanced Practitioner provides: • The most up-to-date guidance on practicing medicine in a wilderness context • An introduction to critical body systems and the general principals of trauma • Specific information on environmental and backcountry medicine • An examination of the medical role in search and rescue missions

Based on Dr. Auerbach’s renowned Wilderness Medicine text, Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine, 5th Edition, is your portable, authoritative guide to the full range of medical and emergency situations that occur in non-traditional settings. Useful for experienced physicians as well as advanced practice providers, this unique medical guide covers an indispensable range of topics in a well-illustrated, highly condensed format – in print or on any mobile device – for quick access anytime, anywhere. An easy-access presentation ensures rapid retrieval and comprehension of wilderness medical information, with "Signs and Symptoms" and "Treatment" sections, bulleted lists, and quick-reference text boxes in every chapter. All chapters are thoroughly up to date, including new information on travel medicine, medications, immunizations, and field treatment of common conditions. Step-by-step explanations from wilderness medicine experts cover the clinical presentation and treatment of a full range of wilderness emergencies and show you how to improvise with available materials. Comprehensive coverage includes dive medicine and water-related emergencies, mountain medicine and wilderness survival, global humanitarian relief and disaster medicine, high-altitude medicine, pain management, and much more. Line drawings and color plates help you quickly an accurately identify skin manifestations, plants, poisonous mushrooms, snakes, insects, and more. Useful appendices address everything from environment-specific situations to lists of essential supplies, medicines, and many additional topics of care.

A memoir from a doctor who rescues hikers, bikers, rafters, and skiers from the wilderness, as part of the Hood River Crag Rats, the oldest mountain rescue team in the country. Christopher Van Tilburg, MD is an emergency room physician, ski patrol doctor, emergency wilderness physician, and member of the Hood River Crag Rats, the oldest mountain rescue team in the country. When Dr. Van Tilburg's beeper goes off, the call may take him racing up a mountain peak to rescue an injured hiker, into a blizzard to search for missing skiers, or to a mountain airplane crash scene for body recovery. Dr. Van Tilburg's work requires a unique combination of emergency medicine, survival skills, agility, and extreme sports. In Mountain Rescue Doctor, Van Tilburg shares personal stories of harrowing and suspenseful rescues and recoveries, including the recent Mount Hood disaster, which claimed the lives of three climbers. Mountain Rescue Doctor is an exhilarating tour through the perils of nature and medicine.